Bautista seventh on first day at Czech GP

Friday, 24 August 2012

Team San Carlo Honda Gresini made a solid start to the Czech Republic Grand Prix today, despite a crash this afternoon for Álvaro Bautista.

Other than that the Spaniard was on the pace of the leading riders in free practice and he ended the day with the seventh quickest time overall. Michele Pirro was thirteenth fastest and a short gap behind the leading CRT in the class today. With a few small improvements to some areas he struggled with today the Italian is confident he can put up an even stronger challenge in tomorrow afternoon's qualifying session.

Álvaro Bautista

“The day didn't finish how we would have liked with the crash near the end of the second session and even though there was no damage to the bike or myself I wasn't able to improve my lap time. We have been working on the set-up of the bike, looking for better stability in corner entry and we worked hard with the rear tyre but it didn't give us the grip we need. So the choice will be to run a hard tyre on the front and a soft on the rear, which will give us better stability and allow us to work on other areas of the bike tomorrow. We made a slight change to the swingarm setting and the feeling was positive so I am confident that we are close to where we need to be and we'll be in a position to challenge for a good grid position tomorrow.”

Michele Pirro

“We managed to set a decent time and we are not far behind the best CRT in terms of lap time and position but we still have to work on a few technical problems that prevented me from being able to push consistently today. We'll work on that tomorrow and try our best to obtain a good starting position for the race on Sunday.”